Machinarium

I noticed Machinarium in the App Store but didn’t buy it until after my friend told me that its her 10 year old daughter’s “new favorite game on the iPad”. She wrote: “The graphics are cool. She had to print something out and decode it. She eventually got stuck on something, and downloaded a video for $.99 on the iphone, but it’s keeping her motivated and intrigued.”

Twist my arm, I downloaded it immediately.

Machinarium is a beautiful adventure app that feels like it takes place in the movie “wall-E.” You control a little robot who must complete mystery tasks to move to the next level. I have very little adventure gaming experience. Only recently, I started playing Air Mail another adventure app that I love.

According to Wikipedia, “An adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and puzzle-solving instead of physical challenge.”

I love puzzles, however, I’m just not great at poking around a screen looking to solve the next mystery. I figured out the first screen of Machinarium pretty quickly and then looked around the second screen. There is a robot guarding a bridge, and your robot wants to cross the bridge, so you ask the robot guard. He says, that robots aren’t allowed to cross the bridge, so I climbed up the lamp post and then I get stuck. That’s when I went online and watched a Machinarium walkthrough.

I play the Machinarium app along with a video guide. For some weird reason it’s fun to watch the how-to video and then try and reproduce it. “Cheating” doesn’t completely take away the challenge, because the video doesn’t show how to tap the screen so there’s still some things to be figured out, and for some reason the walkthrough video makes me more interested in solving the puzzle.

Machinarium is a beautifully illustrated and charming adventure app, currently my favorite. Don’t forget, there’s no shame in using guides to help you solve your games!